Research

Many of the challenges organizations face today—such as persistent inequality, large-scale organizational change, and the adoption of new technologies—are treated as technical problems, as if they had a clear diagnosis and an existing fix that simply needs to be found. As a result, leaders often reach for off-the-shelf solutions suited to tidy, well-understood challenges.

Yet these problems are messy, rooted in beliefs and values, and charged with meaning and emotion. Because they resist one-size-fits-all solutions, meaningful, lasting progress depends on broader shifts in people themselves and the organizational cultures they create. Addressing them requires understanding how these dynamics operate across levels of the organization.

My research asks:

1. How do our workplace cultures, routine work practices, and everyday interactions combine with psychological forces to produce persistent, multi-level problems that keep organizations stuck?

2. What evidence-based interventions can organizations implement to address these persistent problems?

I take a multi-level and interdisciplinary approach to research, drawing from sociology, organization theory, social networks, systems psychodynamics, intergroup relations, and social psychology.

I consider conscious as well as unconscious individual, interpersonal, intergroup, and organizational phenomena, and use computational, longitudinal-archival, and field experimental methods to shed light on new ways of organizing that can enable both people and organizations to thrive and reach their full potential.

To this end, my collaborators and I establish research partnerships to identify obstacles to success for employees and organizations, and then collaboratively design and implement novel field experiments to remove them.

My published and forthcoming work includes one sole-authored paper (American Journal of Sociology, 2019), six first-author and shared first-author papers with a range of collaborators (Management Science, 2024; Academy of Management Review, 2023; Academy of Management Perspectives, 2024; Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2022; Academy of Management Discoveries, 2021; and a book chapter (Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology, 2019).